That left me with an afternoon to fill, if not kill. We had goofy weather around here yesterday. When I got up at six the skies were clear and when the sun finally came up, the sky was beautifully blue but by late morning clouds had started to arrive and for awhile in the afternoon, right around the time I got wanderlust, it looked like it might rain.
As I moonlight as a witch, I needed to avoid precipitation at all costs and even though I suspect we have an annual rain deficit to make up (nothing like Dave M or Chris H in Texas, but still), I wasn't all that upset when the skies lightened. But caution is the better part of valor so I chose to stay home and hiked through the Yantic Cemetery, a very historical cemetery less than a five minute walk from my house.
Some buy houses for their location to schools, shopping or mass transit but, I, the relentless pragmatist, was keen on the walking distance to a cemetery. The disquieting part about the Yantic Cemetery is it's located next door to the hospital-where I'm on a first name basis with the ER staff. Gotta tell ya, it's weird looking out one of the 4th floor windows and seeing a person at a grave site who looks like your primary care physician and then realizing you haven't seen your roommate since he went to the OR for tennis elbow surgery yesterday morning. A chill goes up your spine that has nothing to do with naughty nurses or those half-assed (literally) gowns.
I love reading the headstones and sorting through the relationships--a century and a half ago husbands often outlived their wives because so many of the latter died in childbirth. There are many headstones in the Yantic Cemetery from all the volunteer units formed to help preserve the Union in the fight we call, inaccurately, "The Civil War."
Someone, I know not who, always places small US flags on each of the sites-it's very lovely in a slightly macabre way. And a group of the headstones, I once counted twenty-eight, formed as some kind of squad around a cannon that should look out of place in a a cemetery but doesn't at all. I'm hoping the men, to include the three who died in Andersonville, were buried at parade rest.
While I was there, I encountered someone walking a faux canine (one of those pocket puppies that even when full grown is worthless; if you own one I'm sorry (you're so stupid)) across the plots. He didn't have a bag or a scooper and we both knew he had a pooper. When I asked him about it, he offered me a wan smile that, truth to tell, pissed me off. I started to get revved up-now that I'm old it takes me a while to go from zero to asshole, a whole two seconds or so-when, on cue, the dog took a dump.
He assured me he'd clean it up and started to head for the main entrance/exit gate at the mouth of Williams and Lafayette. I tagged along back to his house, just around the corner, to make sure like MacArthur, he returned. As we were walking back through the gates, sans Rover (the guy's mom raised thoughtless children but not stupid ones), he realized "you're in the newspaper on Wednesdays!" (just to the left of 'Encouragement for End Times Endurance' and not just on the website).
His big concern, as I understood it, was "you're not gonna write about this in the paper, are you?" I had walked back to his house because I knew in my piss he wouldn't have come back to clean up after his dog despite his assurances to the contrary. Absolutely not, I promised him sealed with my finest sincere smile. Hey azzhole! You lied and I lied too. But it's okay, 'because we're all young and naive still.'
-bill kenny
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